I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

Even though I don't sing any more, singing was my first education in the arts, and it's clear to me that my training as a musician also shaped me as a writer.

I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.